Piracy is apparently a big problem in Australia. One of the root causes for piracy is availabilty — it’s easier for anyone with a computer to illegally download files than it is to purchase them. A collaboration between Foxtel, Village Roadshow, News Corp, APRA-AMCOS and other media rights-holders in Australia wants to show you where to find the best places to quickly, easily and legitimately acquire movies, TV shows, games, music and other media.
The Digital Content Guide has launched today. It’s a pretty simple concept — a website that operates as a one-stop-shop listing of Australia’s legitimate digital sources of movies and TV shows, music, games, ebooks and sporting content. In each category, it drills down into sub-categories — for movies, you can choose to rent, download to buy, or watch via subscription.
Each icon in the grid points to a website for a legitimate media service either run by or licenced by rights-holders. Interestingly, Foxtel gets five bites at the cherry in the subscription TV section — you can choose from Foxtel Go, Foxtel Play, Foxtel On Demand, Presto, and vanilla Foxtel, alongside other options like the worldwide BBC iPlayer and Quickflix.
The site itself was built and is maintained by Music Rights Australia. At the moment, the Digital Content Guide is largely restricted to video and audio; ebooks is “coming soon” and the games section includes a few interesting choices like DLGamer.US, which is down at the time of writing but has previously sold content at international pricing in US dollars — presumably with none of that money making it back to Australian rights-holders.
If you want to do the right thing and acquire your digital media legitimately — and you should, since there’s no excuse for piracy that holds water any more, not with the widespread availability of Google Play and Foxtel and iTunes — then the Digital Content Guide seems to be a good place to get your bearings and start comparing the competition. [Digital Content Guide]